In a bit of irony that is quite appropriate for today, the five-year anniversary of this blog (more on that in an hour or so), it looks like the Rental home in Southern California - where we spent more than three years during the middle of the last decade as the housing bubble reached its peak and where this blog was first written - is now up for sale.
If memory serves, the owners paid $555K for it in late-2003 while it was still under construction and we moved in not long after, following the sale of our house a mile away.

That was back in the days when homebuilders could, basically, do as little as possible and people would still come with their "loan pre-approval" papers to buy real estate.

In this case, there was no landscaping provided, no window coverings, and not much of anything else, so the owners must have put about $50K into it at the start, bringing their cost basis up to around the current asking price of $599K which is about what Zillow says its worth.

You probably shouldn't feel sorry for the owners though. Not only are they very nice people but they own a ton of property in Santa Barbara and the only reason they bought this one was to do one of those tax exchange deals to reduce the tax owed on properties they sold up the coast where prices had gone parabolic.

I remember looking up houses in Santa Barbara on Realtor.com back then to see that you could get a 70-year old, 900 square foot two bedroom house - something like this - for about a million dollars. They're about half price now, which still seems way too high.